Using head-mounted eye tracking to examine visual and manual exploration during naturalistic toy play in children with and without autism spectrum disorder

Julia R Yurkovic,Craig A Erickson,Daniel P Kennedy,Kelli C Dominick,Chen Yu,Rebecca C Shaffer,Grace Lisandrelli,Ernest V Pedapati

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-81102-0

Abstract

Multimodal exploration of objects during toy play is important for a child’s development and is suggested to be abnormal in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to either atypical attention or atypical action. However, little is known about how children with ASD coordinate their visual attention and manual actions during toy play. The current study aims to understand if and in what ways children with ASD generate exploratory behaviors to toys in natural, unconstrained contexts by utilizing head-mounted eye tracking to quantify moment-by-moment attention. We found no differences in how 24- to 48-mo children with and without ASD distribute their visual attention, generate manual action, or coordinate their visual and manual behaviors during toy play with a parent. Our findings suggest an intact ability and willingness of children with ASD to explore toys and suggest that context is important when studying child behavior.

Highlights

Multimodal exploration of objects during toy play is important for a child’s development and is suggested to be abnormal in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to either atypical attention or atypical action
The current study employed a head-mounted eye tracking method to quantify how children with and without ASD distributed their visual attention and manual action over toys, and how attention and action were coordinated during play
Our second aim was to determine if previous findings reporting atypical visual attention could be generalized to a more naturalistic context

Summary

Introduction

Multimodal exploration of objects during toy play is important for a child’s development and is suggested to be abnormal in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to either atypical attention or atypical action. Given the importance of toy play for typical development, play has been examined in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a developmental disorder characterized by abnormalities in social communicative abilities and the presence of restricted and repetitive behavior and attention profiles. Other studies using arrays of objects found that young (2- to 5-yo) children with ASD do not look at fewer images overall in visual arrays but instead look at fewer images of low interest to individuals with ASD (e.g., food, clothes) and more images of high interest to individuals with ASD (e.g., trains, blocks)[27] This may suggest that stimulus type and age matter when studying visual attention in individuals with ASD. Infants and children with ASD display longer latencies to orient to visual s timuli[31,32], suggesting that both disengaging and re-engaging with visual stimuli are impaired

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